Tag: software

There’s a web app I’ve been considering writing for a while, in a kind of “wouldn’t that be nice to have” sort of way. One of the things it would need to be able to do is play back audio at a slower tempo than the original one without changing the pitch. There are plenty of commercial applications that let you do this, some of them quite good. My favorite is Anytune for iOS (and they’re working on a MacOS version). And there are various commercial and free libraries to do it in your own application. I’d tried a few and wasn’t happy with how much they cost if they were any good, or how awful the audio quality was if they were free.

Until just now, when I tried Rubber Band Library. It’s a library for time-stretching and pitch-shifting that sounds great with its default settings, has a ton of options for tweaking the settings to sound even better, is available under the GPL for open source projects, and has a reasonably priced commercial license for places where you can’t use the GPL, such as the Apple app store.

Did I mention it sounds great? Here’s a sample of “Road To Westfield” by Garry Harrison and the Mule Team, stretched to half-speed, first with the time stretch filter in Audacity, then with the default settings of Rubber Band, and finally with the “Mushy” preset of Rubber Band. Each section is 15 seconds long, and there’s a 5 second cross-fade between each. The default of Rubber Band sounds a ton better than Audacity to me, but the bass is still pretty messed up. The mushy preset is definitely good enough for what I want to do. Check it out:Continue reading “Time stretching audio”

I hate hate hate the stock photography they’re using at this site, and the layout. And honestly, I’m not a big fan of the product. But if you’re a student with a .edu email address and are enrolled “with at least 0.5 course load”, whatever that means (half a credit? half of a full load?), you can get Microsoft Office Ultimate, which normally retails for $680 (or $250 with the academic discount) for $60 at The Ultimate Steal. Or you could use OpenOffice for free, but I guess there might be situations where you need the Microsoft product. In which case, $60 is a very good price.

(If you meet the eligibility requirements, have no plans to take advantage of this offer, and would like to make a quick $10, drop me a line.)